Stone bar tops in Ardleigh Green

Yes. Ardleigh Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Where the knock-through has taken in a rear bay, the far end of the room is three faces of window with no usable wall left at all. These bars nearly always land at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, which means the piece is read from both sides and both sides get the same edge treatment rather than one being left as a cut face. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. The steel and the corbels travel that same route and go in first, so a bar is three separate carries into one room rather than a single delivery. A polished front edge is protected from the tail lift to the frame. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. A trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. Two trips to the van, one for hardware and one for stone.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. A bar goes in last, so it is measured last. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. What gets leaned on gets specified for leaning.

Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. A bar laid over that is a second level rather than a wider one, so it wants a spine underneath it and a settled detail where the two heights meet. A bar top is a shape decision with steel attached to it. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. A bar top is levelled to itself rather than to what it stands on, so the packing goes into the frame and the stools take up whatever the floor is doing. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out. Confirm the finished height you want and whether the bar is seen from both sides, and tell us who is building the frame and when it will be complete. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. Fixings into structure are agreed before they are drilled.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The rear extension is usually the newest and truest part of the building, so it is the older half of the kitchen that gives the trouble. A bar top put into a room like that is an overhang question first, because the nose has to carry people leaning on it long after the slab has stopped being interesting. What the frame does under the stone is half the job.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Houses at the later end of this period went up in cavity rather than solid brick, so two that look identical from the road behave differently when a fixing goes in. A bar here usually appears at the open end of a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, where it is read from both sides and both sides have to be finished to the same standard. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. There is a chimney breast on each flank wall, and the one in the kitchen carried a boiler flue rather than a fireplace, so the recess beside it is shallow. The side passage means a full length can generally reach the room whole, so the break count answers to the slab and to the frame rather than to the front door. A long counter is a beam before it is a surface.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought.